


A work of art

by bloodandcream



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, art student cas, life model Meg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-06
Updated: 2015-03-06
Packaged: 2018-03-16 15:31:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3493520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloodandcream/pseuds/bloodandcream
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When he was a young child his mother would take him to museums. To see all the classics of the great painters, to appreciate art. For art is the soul of humanity, she would say. Art is what separates humans  from other animals. To dream, to wonder, to create. His father, however, was always more practical minded.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A work of art

Castiel is not certain why he’s here.

In his freshman year of college he took all the classes that he was supposed to take. He took the core requirements suggested and he took the classes that his advisors had told him would set him on a good path to being a business major. It’s what his family wants. Which is what he’s always done.

He’s a sophomore now. And he is still enrolled for all the necessary and suggested classes to achieve a bachelors in business. But. He has also managed to sneak an art class in next to all his other classes. It’s covered by his scholarship. And he is still taking all the suggested and required classes. It’s on top of everything else. The art class bumps his credits up to twenty.

Castiel hopes that he will manage, because if he does not keep his GPA up he will lose his scholarship. He feels like he needs it though. Like he needs some kind of beauty, some kind of experience outside of the numbers and sheets of his business classes.

When he was a young child his mother would take him to museums. To see all the classics of the great painters, to appreciate art. For art is the soul of humanity, she would say. Art is what separates humans from other animals. To dream, to wonder, to create. His father, however, was always more practical minded.

Castiel wants to create. Oh he longs to make something with his hands for no reasons other than to enjoy the creation of it, to see the beauty of it. So he snuck a class in. He reads books in his spare time and spends his weekends at the museum, but any time he takes a pencil or a brush to paper it seems so…. inadequate.

It’s only a basic life models class. Something for beginners. Something to understand the human body and how to translate it to paper. Bodies fascinate him, they perturb him and make him curious. Rarely has he ever found himself attracted to another person in a sexual sort of way. But he frequently finds himself aesthetically attracted to other people. Watching the movement of their limbs, the flex of their muscles, how thoughts translate to body language with the flick of hair or the quirk of lips.

He feels he can understand from an outside perspective how other people work. In a formulaic, mechanical sort of sense. Castiel does not understand how he works. He does not understand the why or the wherefore. He feels, however, that it is not necessary. Not for the life that he pursues, that his family wants him to pursue. Business is not about the variables of desires and spontaneity and experiments.

Art is.

Castiel understands why this is dangerous. He understands why religions and societies have placed strict bans on art. He understands why invading countries have decimated the art and culture of the places they invade. He understands why people harm themselves for their art. He understands it. But he does not feel it on a visceral level.

His teacher is kind. An older man with salt and pepper hair who is quiet, severe. He scares many of the students. Castiel likes him. They study photographs and texts for some time, they study dummies and draw with charcoals and pencils from what is projected on the wall.

Castiel still feels inadequate. He wants to weave visions with his fingers and inspire life, spark that sense of wonderment and desire. He feels inadequate. But when class is over he returns to his small dormitory and he sketches, for hours and hours, from pictures and from still life’s. He takes a sketch patch to the park on the weekends and tries to capture the motion of birds in flight with something so simple as a pencil. It’s maddening how little he can translate from his mind to his hands. But he tries, and as the weeks go by he feels slightly better about the whole ordeal.

Finally, in the last quarter of the semester, they are to draw a real life model. Someone organic, someone who breathes and shifts minutely throughout the sitting.Castiel’s fingers itch to take up the challenge.

He arrives early to class on the first day that they are to attempt rough sketches of the model. Their teacher assures them that the same model will be there for the rest of the semester. It’s only an introductory class, and he wants them to be familiar with the subject. To draw her, again and again and again from different angles and in different lights. Castiel is certain that this will be an aesthetically stimulating exercise. But he never expected it to be sexually exciting.

She is not the sort of woman that he would ever pursue, that he would ever approach in casual conversation. This woman, with dark hair tumbling in waves over her shoulder and immaculate black lines underneath her eyes, she has silver hoops through her lips and nose, her nails are painted in chipped red polish, her skin pale but swirling with the bright color of a myriad of tattoos. Castiel, his first reaction is to see her as an abomination, someone aberrant and unclean, someone who is less than. Yet as she peels her layers off - unconcerned in her nudity - as she reveals what Castiel cannot but describe as art painted across her skin, he is awestruck.

Her body is clasically pleasing, slender and curving in the way that the world supposes a woman should be. She is petite, and he might think of her as delicate or vulnerable if he had not seen her punch someone outside the art building. He is not sure why she had. But there is fire in her eyes and she breathes mysteries between her lips as they turn up at him.

He supposes that she is toying with him. There are sixteen students in the class, all hunched behind their easels with charcoals gripped in their fingers as they try to hack out her form across their pages. Does she not toy with them all? There is ease in her limbs that makes him think she has done this before many times, that she enjoys this. The eyes on her, that reduce her to a subject, to an object, that desire to catalogue her and the particular shape of her hips, the muscle of her calves, the flow of her hair and the valley between her breasts. Castiel wonders what it is like, to be so brazen.

When she lifts her arms above her head, lounging back on a small couch with her legs hanging over, there is hair underneath her arms. Castiel notes that her legs are finely haired as well, he simply hadn’t noticed underneath the bright tattoos that crawl over her body. Snakes and flowers and skulls. She is a work of art herself. He has never seen women like her. Colorful and bold. She does not lower her eyes. She does not make excuses or cover herself. Her body is natural and unnatural, a creation entirely of her own will. Castiel longs to know what that is like, to choose, to create, to be.

He does not think he could ever tire of trying to capture her.

The class has ended, like so many before and the semester is winding down to a close. Castiel has handed in his sketches for the day, lingering to talk to his teacher about taking additional art classes the next semester. He doesn’t think he would be so bold as to change his major from what his family has chosen for him, but with enough hard work perhaps he could earn a minor or even double major. Or perhaps it’s just a dream. But dreams are nice to have sometimes aren’t they.

Packing up his supplies, neatly ordering his pencils and charcoals and erasers in his little organizer, Castiel quietly tidies after himself. He has no classes left for the day. No work. There are papers to be written and tests to study for, but he thinks he might take his sketch pad to the park.

Hands cover his own where they tug gracelessly at his back pack’s zipper. ‘Hey’ she says. Hey. It’s casual like the drape of her limbs. Now she is clothed though, in a tank top and torn jeans. His hand twitches beneath hers and he gives her a weak ‘Hello’.

Castiel doesn’t understand why someone like her - unfettered and wild, she lives like a creature with no horizon the entire world her bounty - why she should ever touch a creature like him. He has rules. Expectations. Patterns. Castiel is a creature of habit. But she takes his hand and talks to him with that tongue of hers that’s barbed and sweet at the same time.

She breaks his patterns.

He breaks his patterns for her. And he likes it.

This creature is entirely out of his range of comfort and she is utterly foreign to him. Although the words are technically recognizable he feels as though she speaks a different language. She demands his time and he pays her his attention. But it comes so easy. Perhaps not natural, not like the flow of a river towards the ocean, but easy. It’s a lightness in his limbs that he’s not familiar with, a warmth beneath his skin. Easy. Bold. He lets her lead him, he encourages her.

Her body knows many things, besides beauty and art. Oh but she gives him plenty of that, posing for his cheap camera phone, sprawling on his small dorm bed as he smudges charcoal across a page and blends it out with a soft cloth. She gives and gives of her body while she takes and takes of his mind. Like she’s starved for thoughts. For the strange landscapes between his ears that he whispers to her at night when their bodies are cradled together. Castiel has always dreamed of more, of vast sky scapes and promising unknowns. His dreams are the most precious things he has.

Except, perhaps, for her now.

She likes strawberry ice cream. Combat boots and neon lingerie. Her nails are sharp and her teeth are cruel, she leaves marks on his bodies like a storm. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to rebuild his foundation quite like it used to be, not after her. He’s not sure if he wants to. She poses for him, and demands his attention, but she gives things that Castiel suspects she did not even know she had to give. He takes them from her. He would like to polish them, gather them up, and show them to her. To show her how much she is worth to him. All the beauty that she gives him.

Castiel likes to trace the lines of color across her skin, with the pads of his fingers and the flat of his tongue. He likes to taste the sweat of her body and the secrets between her legs. The way she moans is a new language to him, yet not as expressive as the curl of her fingers and the fluid arch of her body from ribs to hips.

He believes he understands, perhaps - or has simply caught a glimpse - of that old adage that one’s body is a temple. It’s merely that, everyone worships in different ways.


End file.
